A relentlessly upbeat but necessary story of an important environmental organization.
The 40-year history of the National Resources Defense Council.
In this wholly positive view of NRDC, the authors write from the perspective of John Adams, the co-founder and longtime president. Though to some extent a personal memoir, the book is primarily an institutional history filled with insider details. The organization began as a group of lawyers suing to enforce environmental laws, so effectively that they nicknamed themselves “the shadow EPA.” With time their approach broadened, primarily because of political leaders hostile to environmentalism, who come in for criticism here. The authors repeatedly emphasize the successes that came from negotiating with adversaries, building a membership to provide public pressure and showing companies how environmentally friendly practices can be in their financial interest. Similarly, the issues of concern to NRDC expanded beyond the original focus on “clean water, clean air, a sustainable environment, and the preservation of America’s unique wilderness.” For example, they were instrumental in setting up nuclear-test monitoring stations in the United States and Soviet Union with an eye to promoting disarmament. Despite covering many campaigns and introducing an enormous number of people, the narrative is never dry or repetitive. Today, the authors insist that what “NRDC and the environmental movement ultimately will be remembered for is what we did to deal with the climate crisis.” Some environmentalists have called the authors too optimistic about the eventual resolution of the issue and criticized their willingness to endorse imperfect regulations. In response, they argue that it is more important to get started than to insist on perfection and, with NRDC’s long string of victories behind it, they express confidence of eventual success. The book begins with a foreword by Robert Redford, one of the many celebrities mentioned as major NRDC supporters.
A relentlessly upbeat but necessary story of an important environmental organization.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8118-6535-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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